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Whole hugeass team standing at the front of the room, including a Peter deHaan.  Near the beginning they all introduced themselves, but I can’t type that fast and I’m sure it wouldn’t mean too much in a blog.  These notes are pretty rough - if something doesn’t make sense or you want more info, ping me and I’ll try to find an answer for you. Or if you were there and it needs fixing/clarification, please comment!

Matt Chotin said:

Flex 3 beta released on Labs today. See Flex guys with their flash drives if you want it.

See Flex roadmap tomorrow or Wednesday - sessions on both days.

Bootcamp Wed morning 9-12 - 5 and 10 minute sessions to find out whats going on in Flex from your peers, demos from Flex team. If you want something to be discussed, you bring your ideas to the beginning.
Ad-hoc, will cover what you guys want.

Recommend going to keynote and sneaks tomorrow.

Bugs.adobe.com/flex. Please file bugs and feature requests, and vote. Important that you vote so they know what’s important to you. Voting means that you care. Bugs sit in community status - means community has filed them, but does not mean that they’ve read through all of them - if you vote, it raises the status to the team, and they will make sure to look at it. Please vote for enhancement requests as well. And file those enhancement requests too.
FAQs answered by a variety of team members:

* “What’s Thermo?”  - answer “Go to the keynote”.

* Bi-directional support (Astro) - we need astro - that’s when Flex will get right-to-left text.

*Alright we saw Astro, when will Flex support it?  In the next Flex release. Flex will support FP9, and optionally support the Astro Player.

* When will it support mobile initiative?  Always thinking of this stuff. Working very hard on the next version of AVM - AVM2. When that’s complete, will work hard on a framework that can go ahead and support mobile. So a little ways away.

* When is Flex 3 coming out? Early 2008. Jan is very early 2008. April is mid-early 2008.

* Performance. When will Flex and FB going to be faster? Get beta 2 - lots of work on performance in the beta 2, so please download it and check it out. Talk to David, George, Paul. They want to hear about your projects and what they can do to work on it and make it even better.

* Are we going to see FlexBuilder on Rails? Flex team is thinking about it, warm to the idea, but not a lot to say right now. Might be able to weasel some stuff out of the team if they get drinking tomorrow at the party.

* Are they going to integrate Cairngorm into the framework? Actively considering this for a future release. Idea is being actively considered. Bulk of the people are doing a framework of some sort, so looking at it for a future release.
Don’t have to use it, but if choose to use it Flex can give you more support. Some people don’t like it - frameworks are kind of like a religion - so it will be an option. The team really wants to hear your feedback, as they’re not committed to any one in particular, and they want to know about the bounds and what’s the right framework to use. They will never make a framework or using one a requirement in Flex.

* Memory management, garbage collection a black art. In lieu in having a way to enforce it, will they offer best practices for developers so they can release objects from memory and be more effective about memory usage. Answer: yes. Team has done a great job of the proflier - still work they can do, more tooling and stuff at a macro level. Tooling on the roadmap.

* What’s the roadmap for plugins? FDS plugin and so on. Now that there are basics in place in IDE, now looking at more sophisticated things. Over the last year seen lots of requests for local tooling enhancements, ability to work between client and server in more effective ways - we’ve decided to double the size of the team, so lots more things can do.

* Automated testing. Is it possible to have a scripting language. FlexUnit is nice, but is there something more? Automation framework is moving to be part of FlexBuilder. Flex 3 has two editions - standard edition and FB professional edition will include charting, profilers, test automation framework (license as part of FB instead of data services). Changing pricing - FB will be $249 entry point. FB Professional will be $699 — lots of added value. Flex 2 pricing will align to Flex 3 price points early. Nov 1st can get Flex 2 at those same lower prices. Upgrade pricing will be in line with existing things in the past, but it has not been announced yet. Since automated testing part of FB Pro, will enable a lot more people to work with it and build testing frameworks. Lots of partners to start supporting Flex, and more people in the testing space.

There was a bit more geek talk, but I think that was the  main gist of things.

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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